<p>One thing to keep in mind when viewing CDS data (25% & 75% SAT scores, ave. GPA, % in top 10% of graduating class, etc.) is that not all applicants are the same. An applicant who wants to know his/her chances needs to understand which applicant bucket they fit in. Here are buckets that are commonly referred to as receiving special consideration in Admissions, in order of importance:</p>
<p>-Recruited Athlete? (scholarship or non-scholarship…doesn’t matter)
-African American, Hispanic/Latino, American Indian = (URM)?
-Legacy?</p>
<p>-Non-URM Life special circumstances (e.g. applies to all including white European and Asian/Indian):
…-Low income and/or high societal hurdles?
…-1st Generation college?
…-inspiring enormous obstacle overcome? (this does not include the normal obstacles in growing up)</p>
<p>-underrepresented Geographic region?
-Gender? (females compose 56% of the college applicant pool).</p>
<p>A URM male with 1900 SAT, 3.6 uw GPA in a non-competitive HS, might be accepted into Penn over a white female with 2250/3.9 uw GPA.</p>
<p>If the applicant does not fit into any of the above categories (e.g white middle class female), and assuming very good but not exceptional letters of rec and ECs, then the applicant should understand that the bottom 30% - 40% (depending on how small the uber selective college is) in stats of the accepted students are almost entirely special admit (hooked) applicants from the above categories. Therefore, an unhooked applicant should be looking at his/her bucket as containing those students with stats in the upper 60% of the enrolled students, disregarding the bottom 40% entirely.</p>
<p>I’ve read a few times that an un-hooked applicant is a match to a selective college, in terms of stats, only if their stats are at he 75% in the CDS data. This makes sense to me.</p>
<p>The sort of Admissions boost for each category depends on the unique goals of each college. To get an idea of how much some of these categories matter to admissions officers, look at the admissions point formula used by University of California, San Diego, currently ranked #35 in USNWR. Note that UCs by law are not allowed to use the category of URM I listed above, and are not bold enough to put in print the # points added to a recruited athlete 
. <a href=“http://www.ucsd.edu/prospective-students/freshmen/eval-process.html#process[/url]”>http://www.ucsd.edu/prospective-students/freshmen/eval-process.html#process</a> All schools use some sort of system to create sub-categories of applicants, or Buckets as I called them above, to review applicants…they don’t have point scales like this, but the result is the same.</p>